PC Magazine writes that PCI SIG, the overseer of all things PCI, has decided to delay the release of the finalized PCI Express 3.0 specification until 2010.

The delay will push products based on the PCIe 3.0 spec into 2011, given the average delay between design and implementation. The change in scheduling is an obvious departure from the original spec that called for a 2009 release, with products coming the following year.

The delay, says PCI SIG president Al Yanes, is owed to extra effort being done to assure that current PCIe 1.0 and 2.0 products will work in 3.0 slots.

The new PCI Express 3.0 interfaces uses 8GHz signaling, compared PCIe 1.0’s 2.5GHz and PCIe 2.0’s 5GHz. The new bus also switches from 8-bit and 10-bit data encoding to 128- and 130-bit encoding. Yanes confirmed that extra effort is under way to verify that each frequency’s electrical model can handle the new encoding scheme.

Yanes said that PCI SIG members were largely happy with the decision to delay the specification for the sake of backwards compatibility testing.